


Curiouser and Curiouser (A Study in Cerulean - Chapter 3)

by angwe



Series: A Study in Cerulean [3]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Cyberpunk, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-22
Updated: 2012-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-29 23:00:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/325130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angwe/pseuds/angwe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which John and Sherlock interview their client, the CEO and President of Morstan Industries, Mary Morstan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Curiouser and Curiouser (A Study in Cerulean - Chapter 3)

“Oh, hello. I believe we’re expected. Can you look me up?”  
Sherlock’s facility with flirting always bothered me slightly, as I knew, for a fact, that it was merely a matter of keeping up with the practice of dissembling. He wasn’t heartless enough to lead most people on further than a wink and a nudge, but it still irked me to see yet another personal assistant giggle in that particular way, and they all giggled.  
“Well, sir, could you tell me what your name is?”  
“Holmes. Sherlock Holmes.”  
“Well, aren’t you just the double-oh-seven?”  
“Do you really think? I quite like that.”  
Tap, tap went the mouse, and though you could never tell if these pretty androgynes were real or cyberbrains in a very expensive body, this one was good with being flattered.  
“Yes, sir. You are, in fact, expected. If you will wait in the anteroom, I will make sure Ms. Morstan is ready to receive you.”  
“Thank you...”  
“Christoph, sir.”  
“Christoph. Thank you, Christoph.”  
I had to suppress a chuckle when the wry, but charming, grin melted from his face once the door was closed.  
“Why do you always do that?”  
“Why should I put them on their guard? People who feel you’ve been nice are more likely to talk to you should you need information from them later, John.”  
“If you can get them around to the information you want.”  
"They always talk to me."  
"Always?" The smirk couldn't be contained.  
"Alright. Alright. I'll admit that it backfired with the shopkeeper in Malaysia."  
"You had asked me to remind you, if ever-"  
"Yes, I'm aware."  
He didn't look hurt, but I knew it wasn't always in his nature to be glad of these little reminders. I was the conscience he knew he needed, but didn't entirely appreciate.  
Our entire flat could have easily fit into the "sitting room" we had entered, and the decor was designed to do nothing but enhance the open effect. It made a different impression on my psyche, however, to be almost obsessively reflected in the combination of half-shaded grey-glass on one side, and an array of mirrors on the other. Reduplication always brought on strong flashbacks to the war.  
"I certainly hope we don't have to wait too long in here."  
This seemed an odd remark from my friend, given that he was, when gathering data, almost disturbingly patient. I suspected his concern was equal parts the hound on the scent and subconscious worries about my own state.  
“We are trying to talk to the head of a large multi-national, Sherlock, not just some executive vice-president.”  
“And?”  
I rolled my eyes despite already knowing that this would be his attitude.  
“And it would be bad protocol indeed if she simply took us right into her office.”  
“And equally bad protocol if she kept us waiting too long, John.”  
“You would be more annoyed by the former, implying that we were a nuisance to be taken care of as quickly as possible.”  
“I am patient as the mountain.”  
“No you’re not. You’re as patient as it takes to get the information you need.”  
We both turned suddenly at a click from behind one of the half-glass mirror-walls. I didn’t need cyber-enhanced eyes to tell that the door was both very real, disappearing outward into the floor and ceiling, and at least partially illusory, the transition through smoke effects making a powerful entrance effect.  
Two beats behind my partner, my brain re-engaged. He was back in mildly flirtatious mode, while my speech-centers were still coming online.  
“Hello. Ms. Morstan, I presume?”  
“Indeed, Mr. Holmes,” floated across the room as the impeccably dressed woman stepped forward. Her eyes were black liquid flowing from Sherlock to me as she sized us up.  
“Doctor? Watson, yes?”  
The question mark was there, just barely, but protocol-perfect in the inquiry as to my proper title, and I almost couldn’t respond.  
“Ms. Morstan.”  
I wished, at that moment, I’d had a hat to tip to her, as every part of me screamed to show this sublime example of human form all the courtesies history had ever known. I had to settle for a nod, and hoped it had covered my all too obvious survey of her.  
“Delighted, gentlemen, to have you here at Morstan Industries.”  
“Why do you keep such an archaic moniker, Ms. Morstan?”  
“Well, Mr. Holmes, I admit that the raw industrial output of our operation is much smaller a part of what we do here, but it is our roots and our tradition. It’s also still a sizable chunk of our profit, but I suspect you already knew that.”  
“Rather impressive 37.2% market share in cyborg bodies, but largely irrelevant to why I’m here.”  
“Oh?”  
“We do know that the missing executive was in charge of the limb replacement and enhancement division,” trying to catch her eye. A moot point, I noticed a split second later as I came up from my notes to check whether I’d been successful, only to find her throwing her reply sideways toward Holmes as she checked me out.  
“This way, if you please.”  
Beckoning us through the open door, she pulled her look away and arched a perfectly sculpted brow at the detective who’d been shifting his gaze about the room and was only slowly turning toward the door.  
“Of course, of course,” came distractedly as he continued his survey while ambling toward us.  
I, meanwhile, had thought to bring myself closer to our lovely client right away, hoping to get to know her better.  
“Do you find it often best to avoid ‘shop talk’, Ms. Morstan?”  
“Why do you ask, Doctor? Oh, and please call me ‘Mary’.”  
“Because I think I’d like to ask you a few questions of my own, not entirely pertinent to the investigation at hand, about some of your company’s memory components, but they’re entirely for personal knowledge reasons, in my professional line, and there’s a fine line between frank interest and boorishness.” Almost forgetting myself in watching for her reaction, “Oh, and ‘John’ works for me.”  
The hint of a smile played across her full lips, and I found myself hoping desperately that she found my nearly messing up protocol to be charming and not pathetic. By this time, Holmes had caught up and passed us on his way into the room.  
Once again, I found that I might suspect “room” of being a bad descriptor. “Palatial suite” might work better, except that this was completely open, with no hint of side-rooms or walled-off corners. Her desk was spare, modern, and completely clean.  
“I asked them to render it on the floor, but there was a minor glitch when they originally set it up. I found that I rather liked the floating effect, so I never bothered to have it corrected.”  
“Fascinating. What work was Mr. Bialchek doing in the SLEDZ?”  
“I’d have thought you’d found that out by now.”  
I had to suppress a smirk. She’d intoned the statement just a shade shy of sarcasm.  
“I have two or three official reasons and a full set of hypotheses, but I make no theories about a case until I have all my data. Official sources can be cryptic and, frankly, useless.”  
“Well, then you know he was in South Leeds to begin our expansion project. The economic development zones are prime location for those of us who still consider being a British corporation a point of pride.”  
“Official. Boring. Useless.”  
Once again, I found myself biting down on a reaction. If it weren’t for her bemused expression, I’d have worried about Sherlock offending our client.  
“Please, have a seat gentlemen.”  
She practically floated down into her chair and drew a tablet from thin air. It was rendered to look a bit like a reporter’s notebook, but no stylus was forthcoming. Sherlock kept to his feet, but I was only too happy to sit, hoping that by moving less I might seem more graceful, or at least stable.  
“Per my orders, Mr. Bialchek was to recon at least four potential building sites, full raze, and three existing structures, retrofit. He mentioned also that his side-business interests, something we encourage here at Morstan Industries, would benefit from his visiting an additional three sites. He was kind enough to put that information into his personal files about the trip. As he has gone missing, I petitioned the majority shareholders and they granted access to strip one level of privacy from his files for purposes of the investigation.”  
“You asked your family if it was OK to snoop into the missing veep’s files.”  
“I’m willing to share the information with you, Mr. Holmes.”  
“Of course you are, you didn’t have to try very hard to get it.”  
“Do you have a problem with the way our company is structured? Seems like an arcane thing to interest you. The kind of tobacco ash you might find on the fourth floor of my grandfather’s house, maybe, but not corporate governance structures.”  
“White collar crime is still crime, even if it’s usually petty and boring.”  
“What, exactly, are you implying?”  
“Merely that the particulate spectral analysis would show that your grandfather’s penchant for genetically resurrected nineteenth century Turkish tobacco isn’t the only thing that can capture my attention.”  
“Oh, and here I thought you might be accusing me of something.”  
“I am.”  
The longest conversational beat I’ve ever had the misfortune of participating in occurred right in this moment. I had half-opened my mouth to kill it when she saved me.  
“Of course. Personally, I know that he has two other limited-liability corporate interests who are ostensibly in the data-centric construction business. In addition to his three above-the-board jobs, CCM Services and DataCon are seemingly not linked to him, but he ran them.”  
“Runs them, I think you’ll find. Or something like him.”  
“You already knew about them?”  
“I have my sources.”  
“Someone in government. Active data-mining for countermeasures is lucrative only if you can find the right contacts.”  
“Wait. Wait. He ran pre-ops counter-mining?”  
“Under the guise of data-haven construction.”  
Oops. I’d just placed myself behind the curve in the conversation, and Sherlock’s twitch of annoyance was only mildly worth it.  
“Are there any other contracts worth seeking in that line?”  
“Of course there are, John. I have copies of the RFPs from at least five trans-national corporate entities, under the guise of shell corporations with government links, and less formal proposals of shadow contracts from twenty-one other groups. All of this based solely on your publicly available versions of our previous cases.”  
“John, of course, has the soldier’s habit of assuming no one is stupid enough to engage in cyber warfare without something as big as a national unit supporting them.”  
“Oh, I don’t discount the existence of mercenaries. I’ve run into enough of them. They just never seem to be forward-thinking enough to see the benefits of using their resources that way.”  
“A hazard of living to close to the edge, I’d guess. The good ones don’t look like mercs anyway.”  
“This is all very fascinating, I’m sure, but once again, I want you to tell me what you know. I must have my data.”  
“Sit tight, then, boys.”  
They both cracked a wry grin. Something about Ms. Morstan impressed Holmes, I could see, and she seemed to appreciate a good contractor. I smiled along with them, suspecting a good story was in the works. Sherlock finally sat down and steepled his fingers.  
“Mr. Holmes, it goes something like this. Five months ago, Bialchek put in a request for two weeks vacation, and confessed to me in private that he’d only be out of the country for the first week, and that if there were any urgency on a matter in which he was involved during the second week, that I could call him in. Specifically, however, he requested that only I make any decisions to bring him back. None of his equals should know.  
“Now, I like my employees as much as the next person, and I actually pride myself a bit on picking people for the executive veep roles who I know can both do the job and fit the ‘way of life’ as it were, here in the upper echelon. Bialchek had not failed to live up to expectations in the five years since I’d hired him. I had no reason to think his request anything but normal. Sometimes you just need the time off without going anywhere.  
“I approved the time off and made a note in my personal files of the caveat. Two weeks before his vacation, Bialchek made some...interesting financial decisions. None of them catastrophic, but if two of them hadn’t paid off so well, the other three might have devastated him. Before you ask, I’m able to follow the public markets, as can anyone, and know how to watch the trades to read the real story.”  
“I had noted those in my preliminary investigations.”  
“Then you also know that right before he left, a similar series of transactions occurred. I called Bialchek in for a meeting, and he used the Presenter to be here. When questioned about his actual whereabouts, he requested our privacy protocol. I’ve noted it here in my meeting logs.”  
“That’s not what you said the shareholders.”  
“Of course not. I can’t. I abide by my own rules, Mr. Holmes.”  
“Then why are you telling me?”  
“Because what I gave you changes the rules, you know that perfectly well.”  
“No. I don’t. I needed to hear you say that.”  
It was a rare thing for Sherlock to say, but he always meant it. I flagged a few of my own notes in response, as it indicated heightened avenues of inquiry. He did, in fact, know that. No one hired him unless the rules had changed.  
“May I proceed?”  
“Of course, Ms. Morstan.”  
“During his ‘actual’ vacation, once again the wobbles occurred in what I knew were his stocks, painting another picture of a narrow escape. However, upon what I knew was his return to the country, I noted a steady rise in the price of his secondary contract-reference stock.”  
“Noted.”  
“Yes, well, I’m not certain you have the full picture of the three-part shell corporation strategy he employed.”  
“I do, in fact, know the stated and actual functions of all twenty-seven of his legal entities, including the five that are re-shells of this company.”  
“An unfortunate effect of limited stock is that while this practice generally helps people in other companies keep their alternate identities somewhat more secret, it’s nearly impossible here. I confronted him about the implications and he seemed only mildly surprised that I’d deduced the artificial instability he created to drive contracts toward his most profitable and smallest enterprise.  
“He was appropriately apologetic and made the necessary trades through a few of my cousins to divest the re-shell holdings that funneled through Morstan Industries. When he came back, not a word was said by either of us, but I knew he needed an excuse to head out to SLEDZ to finish the transactions at the lower level. This coincided nicely with our expansion plans.”  
“Which were delayed by four days based on my analysis of your press release patterns.”  
“No stone unturned, Mr. Holmes? Good. Yes, we were prepared to begin pre-expansion investigations during his time off, two days after I confronted him. I delayed them.”  
“Where did he disappear? And don’t tell me you don’t know, I know the biotrackers you use. They are top of the line.”  
“Why do you say disappear?”  
“Because you won’t confirm his death.”  
“We can’t confirm his death. We can say when his trackers went offline temporarily, but they keep reviving and sending normal signals. This should not be possible.”  
“Self-check simul-nerve links?”  
“Yes.”  
“John. Jargon.”  
“Biotrackers often use neurons, or artificial means or both, to keep track of each other as well. Basic system self-check, but also, because of its simplicity, difficult to trick. They know which connections are artificial and which are natural. They also employ neural systemic monitors to keep track of multiple-pathway organic loop conditions. They will occasionally, and randomly, employ feedback-checks to ensure that none of the non-standard loops are severed. Even with the technology that created them, it is considered truly impossible to reverse engineer the system for back-hacking if you intent to splice them.”  
“Meaning that even if you have all the world’s resources at your disposal the organic rewiring would take so long to simulate that you’d fail.”  
“Yes.”  
“Therefore, Mr. Holmes, all I can give you is this.”  
She ‘tore’ a sheet from her tablet and handed it to Sherlock. My systems immediately analyzed it as it passed from her hand to his, and made a copy of the report in the protected network back home. He took it from her, glanced at it, and then made one of his enigmatic sorting gestures as he put it into his pocket. Top-left, inside receiver. He wanted it decoded right away.  
“You should be more careful when you do that, John. Enough of those messages and I might decrypt your key.”  
“Spare keys. One time pads. Constantly generated from bio-sources and coupled with interstellar noise. Keep a chunk of them on hand at all times.”  
“Very well, Ms. Morstan. Thank you for your time. We’ve already taken enough of it. You’ve been most forthcoming with your story.”  
“I’m glad you feel that way, Mr. Holmes. I wouldn’t want to have disappointed you. We can talk another time, John. Here’s my card.”  
I count it among my most precious possessions, but I wasn’t prepared to tell her that at the time.

Five minutes later, we were back on the street, heading home, when I was surprised at a chuckle from Holmes.  
“What?”  
“I’m not sure which is more amusing, John: the fact that the two of you are so obviously attracted to each other, or that you aren’t entirely aware of just how impressive a woman Ms. Morstan is.”  
“I’m not going to bore you with asking about the attraction, so I’ll skip to the more interesting question.”  
“Oh, it’s not as boring as you think. You have a soldier’s mien about you when on the case with me, so you’re not quite as easy to read emotionally. Also, it couples with the other question. I wasn’t quite as distracted as you probably think I was when we were talking in the anteroom. I expected surveillance, and possibly hidden guards, but Ms. Morstan takes things a step further. There is a bodyguard stationed at all times in her presence wearing therm-optic camouflage. The mild delay in her entrance tipped me off, and I would not have seen him were it not for the differential interferometry I’ve programmed into my eye-enhancers. It’s a non-standard use I’ve found that makes them even more useful.”  
“Thermoptic is supposed to kill all the wavelengths we can deal with.”  
“Supposed to and actually does are two different things. I can generate interference with my own body, and watch the reactions to the physical environment in such as way as to render the effect moot, if only by inference.”  
“Watch the system cancel you and trace it back to the source.”  
“Exactly. The most interesting thing, however, is that Ms. Morstan doesn’t need her bodyguard.”  
“Say again?”  
“It’s as much for show as a real secretary is. Based on her movements and positioning, if we’d turned out to be hostile, I’ve no doubts she could have dispatched or, at least, disarmed us and made an easy escape with a minimum of movements. She is better trained than her own bodyguards and better armed, most likely.”  
“You never say ‘most likely’ about these things.”  
“She’s almost a match for me at disguise, I’d wager, but all of her expertise goes into weapons concealment, as her public persona is enough of a mask in most situations.”  
“Hence the ‘most likely’.”  
“Indeed. At the moment, though, I want to think over this problem. I’m hungry and there is a performance at The Lounge I want to catch.”  
Heading through Piccadilly, I couldn’t help but find myself even more taken by Ms. Morstan, who seemed just the woman for a soldier like me to fall for. Of course, I doubted Holmes’s take on her reactions to me. Social circles being what they are, I don’t have quite enough romantic aspirations to think she was being anything more that protocol-polite, and possibly flirting with the contractor to get a better deal. Knowing Sherlock’s taste in music, I’d probably have quite a bit of time to mull this over, and the right background noise for doing it. I couldn’t fault his preferences as far as “thinking music” went.


End file.
